* I’ve long wondered about a book I remember reading around age 12 or 13, in which people above a certain age are capped by a mind-control device, but I’ve never been able to remember anything else about it until I read this, From The New Yorker: “John Christopher’s ‘The White Mountains,’ in which alien overlords install mind-control caps on the heads of all those over the age of thirteen, tore through my own sixth-grade classroom like a wicked strain of the flu.” That’s it.

Cynicism rises to fill the emptied space of exaggerated and failed hope. It’s all simple math. If you follow the money rather than the blather, it’s clear that the American system is a bipartisan fusion of economic models broken down along generational lines: unaffordable Greek-style socialism for the old, virulently purified capitalism for the young. Both political parties have agreed to this arrangement: The Boomers and older will be taken care of. Everybody younger will be on their own. The German philosopher Hermann Lotze wrote in the 1870s: “One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future.” It is exactly that envy toward the future that is new in our own time.

The major advantage that young people retain, however, is that they (we?) have more vibrant sex lives, which is still a pretty sweet deal.

One can also see this in academia: the gap between professors who got tenure before 1975 and people graduating in the last ten years is medieval.

* I’ve long wondered about a book I remember reading around age 12 or 13, in which people above a certain age are capped by a mind-control device, but I’ve never been able to remember anything else about it until I read this, From The New Yorker: “John Christopher’s ‘The White Mountains,’ in which alien overlords install mind-control caps on the heads of all those over the age of thirteen, tore through my own sixth-grade classroom like a wicked strain of the flu.” That’s it.

Cynicism rises to fill the emptied space of exaggerated and failed hope. It’s all simple math. If you follow the money rather than the blather, it’s clear that the American system is a bipartisan fusion of economic models broken down along generational lines: unaffordable Greek-style socialism for the old, virulently purified capitalism for the young. Both political parties have agreed to this arrangement: The Boomers and older will be taken care of. Everybody younger will be on their own. The German philosopher Hermann Lotze wrote in the 1870s: “One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future.” It is exactly that envy toward the future that is new in our own time.

The major advantage that young people retain, however, is that they (we?) have more vibrant sex lives, which is still a pretty sweet deal.

One can also see this in academia: the gap between professors who got tenure before 1975 and people graduating in the last ten years is medieval.